All posts tagged Smartphones

Japanese mobile social network GREE has acquired American smartphone mobile social gaming network OpenFeint for $104 million, as part of a process called a triangular merger. GREE says it is Japan’s leading mobile social network with over 25 million users and a market cap of over $3 billion. OpenFeint likewise says it is the largest mobile social gaming network in the US, reaching over 75 million users on the iOS and Android platforms. GREE plans to provide OpenFeint with additional operating capital so help fuel the platform’s growth.

GoldRun and ADStruc have partnered with Tronic to create an interactive AR billboard in New York City. The billboard, which is near the Holland Tunnel, reads ‘Today I’m Feeling _____’. Users with GoldRun’s location-based smartphone app can view the billboard’s ‘feelings’ with their handsets. The billboard is GPS tagged, so a number of different images can appear as part of the billboard’s ‘feelings’ at the same time. Users can tag the billboard with AR emoticons and share their feelings with others through Twitter and Facebook.

Mobile social network MocoSpace has released data from a March study of its users indicating that users who play social games are three times more active overall on social networks than users who do not play social games. Social gamers typically spent three times as long on MocoSpace as non-gamers and had roughly three times as many friends as the average non-gamer. MocoSpace says this data should be very significant to social advertisers and publishers, as it clearly indicates that social gamers are a highly engaged and therefore valuable audience.

Web-based virtual world Frenzoo has announced plans to develop clients for the Android and iOS mobile operating systems. Frenzoo is powered by the Unity engine and plans to leverage Unity’s cross-platform features to help build its initial mobile client apps as well as a Flash-based release for the upcoming Flash Player with 3D acceleration supported (codenamed “Molehill”). This release is intended to be compatible with mobile Web browsers. In the long term, Frenzoo plans to leverage WebGL and HTML5 to help grow and unify its mobile presence.

Frenzoo expects to launch its first mobile client apps in Q3 of this year. The shift to a mobile focus makes sense given Frenzoo’s core demographic of teen users. Frenzoo emphasizes chat and virtual fashions that users can buy using cash-based virtual currency, giving the virtual world an intuitive way to monetize on mobile. Frenzoo is available in English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, German, Portuguese, and Dutch. Other virtual words are starting to go mobile, too, most notably Avatar Reality’s Blue Mars.

One of the features that distinguishes Android from iOS is Android’s willingness to support alternate app marketplaces like GetJar or the Amazon Appstore. Developers who choose to distribute their games through these alternative marketplaces won’t be able to integrate support for Android’s in-app billing system, which are being restricted to apps distributed through the official Android Marketplace. GetJar Chief Marketing Officer Patrick Mork is highly critical of this decision.